The short film, 10 minutes long, was directed by Springsteen and frequent collaborator Thom Zimny. Released online Wednesday, it comes as a coda to Springsteen’s most recent tour with the E Street Band, which wrapped in May.

The film, which has no dialogue, was apparently shot on the grounds of Springsteen’s Stone Hill Farm in New Jersey. Dressed in a leather jacket and wearing a rucksack, the Boss wields a rifle and a hatchet as he wanders empty fields and skeletal buildings. He befriends a boy who finds him prone and shirtless in a creek. Flashbacks to a bucolic home life, with scenes of a pretty woman hanging laundry and tending to young children, suggest that our hero is questing through some kind of post-apocalyptic setting.

Springsteen described the themes of the song last March in an interview with Rolling Stone: “I started to get into this sort of post-apocalyptic idea. The idea of these travelers in the wasteland, and what’s the guy trying to do? He’s trying to hold onto their humanness, their humanity in all of this ruin. That was the idea. That’s who this guy is, the guy who is hunting out remnants of what makes the spirit.”

Stylistically, his film seems like a cross between Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” and the film version of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” — with Springsteen appearing as a less grungy and desperate Viggo Mortensen.

Springsteen also wrote the elegiac score that leads into “Hunter,” which kicks in around the halfway point. The track appears on his most recent studio album, “High Hopes.”

In a statement introducing the film, Springsteen wrote, “For a long part of the year, Thom Zimny and I have been talking about shooting a short film for ‘Hunter Of Invisible Game.’ We’ve finally got the job done, and we think it’s one of our best. Thanks Thom for the hard work and brotherly collaboration. You and your crew bring it all. And to all of you out there in E St. Nation, we hope you enjoy! See ya up the road.”

About Speakeasy

Speakeasy is a blog covering media, entertainment, celebrity and the arts. The publication is produced by Barbara Chai and Jonathan Welsh with contributions from the Wall Street Journal staff and others. Write to us at speakeasy@wsj.com or follow us on Twitter at @WSJSpeakeasy or individually @barbarachai.